What About Thunderbird?

By now, probably everything good about Thunderbird has been said, but I truly profess still that you need to try out Thunderbird if you are heavily using emails. What is with the plural form of email? Well, email is plural in a sense that you, he, she, everybody else and me might have more than one email account, and having to open up two to however more browser tabs constantly — just to have the webmail accounts stay dynamically update while you’re on your main browser tab doing what you do — is rather cumbersome and not so elegant. Sometimes, it’s rather disturbing for some people to see they have so many browser tabs open! This is why some people think Thunderbird and similar email clients are better for checking emails.

Email clients aren’t there to replace your webmail accounts, because the email clients are there to connect to your webmail accounts and retrieve the emails from the webmail accounts. The awesome thing about using email clients is that the email clients can retrieve all emails from all webmail accounts so you don’t have to manually sign into each webmail account to check email. Of course, you have to provide proper credentials of each webmail account for an email client to store (in encrypted form I hope), therefore all you have to do is to provide a master password at the beginning of every email client session (i.e., starting up an email client) so the email client will then automatically go and retrieve emails from all webmail accounts. Thunderbird works this way!

Anyhow, I like Thunderbird for it’s one of those FREE but yet most reliable open source applications/software I have ever used. Also, newest yet Thunderbird version which is the version 11.0 has made the process of adding new webmail account easier. It seems now you don’t really have to remember each webmail account’s POP/IMAP/etc… settings, because Thunderbird only requires your email addresses and passwords. Behind the scene, the settings obviously would be appropriately set up by Thunderbird wizard for each webmail account. Thunderbird is also somewhat smart as it allows you to teach it how to seek out junk emails by having you from time to time mark new but spam emails as junk emails; once you have done enough marking of junk emails, you can always go to Tools > Run Junk Mail Controls On Folder to weed out the junk emails on particular email folders that you think somehow Thunderbird might have missed weeding out junk emails from those email folders in the first place (my bet is that you don’t have to do so).

I’m not using the Thunderbird’s Add-ons feature, but I can imagine this might be something that people like — it allows people to customize Thunderbird furthermore.

Thunderbird has ton of features (I’m being lazied to go into each feature in detail), and most users probably don’t even need to configure those features as I believe many useful features within Thunderbird might have been turned on by default. Nonetheless, some people like me who would want to go into Thunderbird’s Preferences to furthermore customize Thunderbird. For an example, under Preferences > Security > Anti-Virus, users can check the box which labels as “Allow anti-virus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages.” I’m sure some of you out there might want to go through Thunderbird’s Preferences in detail and make changes, but for others they just only have to simply use Thunderbird. So, I have to conclude that Thunderbird might not be a solution for everything email, but it sure is convenient and useful and pleasurable to use.

Update: Oops, I forgot to tell you that Thunderbird is supporting all major computing platforms. It supports Linux, Mac, and Windows!